Oregon State is one of 28 land grant universities whose accomplishments will be celebrated at the festival from June 27 to July 1 and from July 4 to 8 on the National Mall. More than 1 million people are expected to attend.

Students crash ocean waves into plastic models in the Oregon State University Hinsdale Wave Lab's mini-flume. (Photo by Teresa Morris)

Participants will have a chance to learn how OSU research has turned surimi seafood into a $2.1 billion industry. Students and 4-H faculty will demonstrate robotics and information technologies through Tech Wizards, an after-school mentoring program. And festival-goers can test their engineering skills against crashing ocean waves in a mini-flume designed by OSU’s Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory.

These activities complement gatherings among OSU alumni and faculty, U.S. senators and representatives, Capitol Hill staffers and representatives of the Smithsonian Institution, prime sponsor of the Folklife Festival. The OSU Alumni Association will also host a gathering at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, where two OSU graduates (Chris Johns, editor in chief; Dennis Dimick, executive environment editor) hold leadership positions with the magazine.

On the Smithsonian University Stage, three OSU faculty members (Robin Rosetta, Sam Chan and Jae Park) will give repeated 15-minute presentations during the festival on integrated pest management, aquatic invasive species and seafood.

This year’s festival honors the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which created the land grant university system. Signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the act made grants of federal land available to states for the development of colleges and universities to teach agriculture, engineering and military skills. Subsequent revisions extended the benefits to black and Native American institutions.

The Smithsonian Institution has created an online schedule of events and exhibitors.
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For details on the political history of the Morrill Act, see Milestones in the Legislative History of U.S. Land-Grant Universities by Arnold Appleby, Oregon State University Department of Crop and Soil Science.

The Morrill Act has had far-reaching benefits. See a timeline of milestones for Oregon’s wheat growers and a story about Oregon State’s groundbreaking wheat-breeding program.

Viviane Simon-Brown leads a national Extension network to promote sustainable living.

Viviane Simon-Brown works in a typical office, types away on her computer and networks with colleagues across the country. Not exactly the Earth Mother image. However, the energetic, silver-haired professor of forest resources and Oregon State University Extension Forestry may just be the thoroughly modern version. Inspired by environmental trends and by a 1997, Rotary-funded trip to study community development in India, she has created a national program that emphasizes personal values in sustainability education.

In the Indian state of Kerala, Simon-Brown found a society with an acclaimed health-care system, an exceptionally high rate of education and one of the country’s most effective economic development programs. On top of those signs of success, she found that the average salary was the equivalent of $300 per year. Despite their apparent lack of money, she says, citizens in Kerala are wealthy in many ways. “If money isn’t the answer, then what is?” she wondered.

Simon-Brown had taught programs for community leaders and natural resources professionals, helped to start the High Desert Museum in Bend and led wilderness trips down whitewater rivers. After going to India, she assembled a team and started a national dialogue on sustainable living (a term that she coined). Today, Extension’s National Network for Sustainable Living Education has grown from her work. Starting with 12 colleagues in five states in 2004, it now has more than 80 people at 30 land grant universities. It has also inspired sustainability education efforts in Extension’s 4-H programs for youth.

The emphasis, she says, is on ethics in action, on clarified values that lead to small, simple steps: planting a vegetable garden, driving less by living closer to work, creating a video about kindness, making purchases with a “smart shopping” approach. Simon-Brown created an “Unshopping Card” that reminds us to consider the practical (Can it be recycled? Can it be fixed?) and ethical (Is it “fair trade?” Is it worth the time I worked to pay for it?) aspects of the things we buy.

“We’ve really messed our nest,” she says. “If we don’t turn this around, our kids and our kids’ kids are going to see a world terribly diminished. But it’s too late to be a pessimist. We better get in there and do something.”

Simon-Brown credits Scott Reed, vice provost for University Outreach and Engagement, for supporting her initial efforts in sustainability education. And she regards Alice Elshoff — a friend, science teacher and volunteer at the High Desert Museum — for inspiring her to live life fully. “Alice is an activist. She walks her talk. She gets up in the morning and sings. She’s a marvelous human being,” says Simon-Brown. “I want to be like her when I grow up.”

Puzzling out the interactions of currents, winds and temperatures to locate a lost ship engaged students in real-world problem-solving, a hallmark of the SMILE approach. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Strange, alien environments — far–away planets, fathomless seas, shadowy forests — figure in countless daydreams. What child hasn’t imagined herself at the controls of a futuristic spacecraft? Or at the prow of a wave–tossed vessel? Or on the trail of a secretive beast? Exploiting kids’ universal yen to explore remote and exotic places, a noted OSU outreach program entices underserved students to consider college.

The mostly low–income, rural, minority youngsters who sign up for the Science and Math Investigative Learning Experiences (SMILE) Program meet face–to–face with scientists, engineers and researchers. In teams, they simulate galactic travel, oceanic voyages, ecological problem–solving and all sorts of other mind–expanding projects, both at their schools and on the OSU campus. With guidance from K–12 teachers and college–age mentors, they might, for example, design a self–contained space capsule. Or locate a lost ship using GPS tracking devices. Or study satellite maps for evidence of toxic algae blooms. “Fun, hands–on projects about astronomy, oceanography and ecology make students comfortable with science so they’re not afraid of it,” says Eda Davis–Lowe, SMILE director in the College of Education. “Science and math are essential for college admission. They are the gatekeepers to higher education.” By training teachers, engaging students in learning adventures and offering college scholarships, SMILE leads students through the gates.

Modules on Mars

Last spring, two cohorts of boisterous students from a dozen middle schools teamed up noisily around tables in the OSU Memorial Union to contemplate the constraints of living on Mars. These 192 adolescents from across Oregon, from Siletz Valley on the Pacific Coast to Nyssa and Ontario on Idaho’s edge, considered factors such as raging sandstorms, dangerous sunrays, poisonous air, scarce water and limited power as they designed “crew modules” capable of supporting four to six astronauts for 600 days on the Red Planet.

Giggles and groans erupted when they learned that urine is a source of drinking water in NASA’s recycling system, along with “grey water” (leftovers from sinks and showers) and condensation (breath vapor). One of SMILE’s college–age mentors, OSU mechanical engineering major Ashley Swander of Salem, demonstrated the high–tech NASA technology on a small–scale replica. Then she let the kids come up and operate the manual pump.

At “briefing stations” located around the room’s perimeter, other OSU mentors answered kids’ questions about coping with Martian environmental conditions, power systems and daily living challenges. Steve Carpenter, a student in the Department of Science and Mathematics Education, engaged the middle schoolers with questions designed to provoke higher–order thinking about capturing and purifying water. “In outer space, water’s like gold,” he reminded a seventhgrader named Amy.

For Ontario sixth–grader Ana, a straight–A student aiming for medical school, the “different ways you can recycle water” was the day’s most intriguing lesson. Since joining SMILE in fourth grade, her eyes have been opened, she says, to “so many opportunities.” Ana’s Mars module team, Las Cinco Estrellas (The Five Stars), included her pal Natalie, an aspiring lawyer. Together, the two Hispanic girls talked excitedly about the program’s challenges, teamwork, creativity, firsthand exposure to university life and fun (evidenced by the many “whoops!” and high–fives gyrating through the room). “We get to ask more questions and get more explanations,” Natalie says.

Ana sums it up this way: “SMILE gives us a better chance.”

Rescue at Sea

Lured by such irresistible mysteries as Mars’ red rocks, Earth’s opaque oceans and nature’s intricate web, nearly 5,000 students from 12 Oregon school districts have participated in SMILE during its 20–year history. More than 300 classroom teachers have received professional development to lead weekly SMILE Clubs, where kids take field trips and dig into projects like designing a waterwheel, a catapult, a laser communications system or a crane for hazardous materials. Family math–and–science nights give parents a chance to join in. Once a year, high–school scholars come to OSU and nearby Western Oregon University for a megaevent, a multi–district weekend Challenge. They not only take part in projects like the mission to Mars, developed by engineers and researchers, they also get to meet those very same scientists and hang out with college kids who can give them the skinny on campus life. All of this adds up to what former SMILE Associate Director SueAnn Bottoms calls “education beyond the diploma.”

Whatever project they tackle, all the fourth– through 12th–grade SMILE participants take away one overarching lesson: Math, science, engineering and technology aren’t just dry theories stamped on the pages of boring textbooks. Rather, these fields, windows on challenging and lucrative careers, have exciting applications in the real world. One of those applications is search and rescue. Last spring, Madras senior Nick Katchia was one of 136 high schoolers tasked with finding a mock ship lost on the high seas. Learning about GPS technology, navigation and remote sensing was cool, he says. But what really lit him up was the ocean itself. “I’ve never seen the ocean,” reveals this young man from Oregon’s landlocked high desert, a six–year SMILE participant. “There’s a lot more to the ocean than I realized — currents, deep–sea creatures, plankton blooms.” His buddy, junior Daniel Serrano, was awed by the economics of oceanography. “I was surprised by the cost of a research voyage, from $3,000 per day to $30,000 per day,” says the honor student. “That’s a lot of money!” Then, sounding very much like a concerned taxpayer, he adds, “I hope they know what they’re doing.”

Daniel was jarred, too, when he learned about the tons of junk afloat on the Earth’s oceans. “The garbage stays in the ocean forever,” he explains. “It just keeps going around in circles.”

Oceanographers from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were on hand to guide and prompt the young scientist–wannabes as they battled imaginary 22–knot winds to locate the fictional Juan Marichal, a merchant ship adrift somewhere in a 6,000–square–kilometer area of the Pacific (in reality, they were looking for a wooden dowel hidden in the grass on the MU Quad). NOAA scientist Luke Spence shared his expertise in fisheries and satellite imaging. “We use real nautical charts and real data on currents and temperatures to teach the students about range, bearing, wind direction, speed, all the forces that affect the ship,” says Spence, who is based in Monterey, California. “We try to make the project as real as we can.”

Stratospheric Expectations

The longer students stay in SMILE, the greater their academic success. By the time they’ve spent at least four years in SMILE, their chances of high school graduation are better than 90 percent. That figure eclipses Oregon’s overall graduation rate of 75 percent. But the number is made even more impressive by the fact that SMILE students represent groups — Hispanic, American Indian and low–income whites — whose educational careers are too often cut short. Cool projects are unquestionably one key to SMILE’s track record. But there’s another factor, one that’s more subtle but at least as powerful: believing in these kids. An invisible but insidious form of racism — low expectations for children of color — permeates many public schools, says Davis–Lowe, who grew up in the segregated South. For her, infusing every child’s heart with sky’s–the–limit aspirations is the program’s greatest mission.

“From day one,” Davis–Lowe says, “we treat them all as future college students.”

Larry Roper, vice provost for student affairs (Photo: Dennis Wolverton)

As students explore opportunities, mentors provide personal support

Most students come to college as works in progress, their interests only partially identified, their potential still to be realized. And as they explore and develop that potential, many students find something equally important: a mentor.

OSU offers an “opportunity-rich environment” for mentoring; at the same time, it’s an informal and organic process, says Larry Roper, vice provost for student affairs. Inspiration can come from a faculty or staff member who sees promise in a student, or a student may find it in a teacher or researcher.

Regardless of how they begin, mentoring relationships are characterized by intensity and openness. Mentors may offer specific advice or simply listen without judgment. Other times, they may have to tell students what they don’t want to hear.

“Good mentors seem to know what voice is appropriate at what time to get students’ attention and help them along the way,” Roper says.

Roper’s own experience being mentored in college, by a Russian literature professor and his track coach, remains influential more than 30 years later. The relationships taught him about balance and gave him confidence.

“They helped me uncover my best possible self, always looking for the possibilities in my life that weren’t clear to me,” Roper says. “In the places where my ability didn’t match the potential, they helped me develop the competence I needed.”

“I’ve learned more from her than she’s learned from me,” Bell says. “The rewards far exceed the effort.”

The mentor Chris Bell, associate dean, College of Engineering

The student Eunice Naswali, senior in electrical engineering from Kampala, Uganda

Making a difference Bell was only an “incidental mentor,” he says. With his wife and grown children, he had volunteered through Crossroads International, a community volunteer organization in the Office of International Programs, to serve as a “friendship family” when Naswali came to the United States in 2004. Although his specialty is in a different discipline, civil engineering, Bell encouraged her early on to pursue an internship in the Multiple Engineering Cooperative Program (MECOP). More than 100 companies in Oregon and Washington offers students opportunities through MECOP.

Naswali has completed her first internship at Mentor Graphics in Wilsonville, and she is working in her second at Vestas Americas in Portland this summer. Vestas is one of the world’s largest wind-energy companies, and Naswali hopes the experience will help her in a future career back in Uganda, tackling the country’s problems with power generation and distribution to remote areas.

“You have to see students individually, giving them opportunities to recognize their own strengths.”

The mentor Peter Bottomley, professor in microbiology, College of Science

The student Shawn Starkenburg, Ph.D. ’07, Rapid City, South Dakota

Making a difference As a Ph.D. student and then as a post-doctoral researcher, Starkenburg worked in Bottomley’s lab for almost five years to understand how bacteria process nitrogen in fertilizers and wastewater. He helped to map the genome of a type of bacteria that plays a crucial role in the nitrogen cycle. Although Starkenburg had worked in labs before coming to OSU, Bottomley helped him to hone his writing skills and “to take ownership and creatively approach the research,” Starkenburg says.

For his part, Bottomley sees mentoring as a learning process with different levels of management and input. “It’s very difficult to have one model that you follow with all students,” he says. “You have to see students individually, giving them opportunities to recognize their own strengths.”

A participant in OSU’s Subsurface Biosphere Initiative, Starkenburg received a National Science Foundation fellowship to study the genomics of nitrification. He is now working at Invitrogen in Eugene, Oregon.

“When I see students with real potential, I encourage them. From me, it’s the ultimate compliment to hear, ‘you’d be a great teacher.’”

The mentor Greg Thompson, department head, agricultural education and general agriculture, College of Agricultural Sciences

The student Bibiana Gomes, senior in general agriculture from Sandy, Oregon

Making a difference As a high school student, Gomes showed beef cattle at the county fair and was president of her local FFA (Future Farmers of America) Chapter. Family and friends advised her to go into education, but she spent her first two years at OSU on a different career path.

Still, she couldn’t stay away from agriculture. She joined the collegiate FFA chapter, for which Thompson is the adviser. “I’m passionate about teaching,” says Thompson, “and when I see students with real potential, I encourage them. From me, it’s the ultimate compliment to hear, ‘you’d be a great teacher.’”

Gomes completed her degree last spring and will start an agricultural education master’s program at OSU this fall. Thompson is impressed with how hard she works and her natural ability as a “kid magnet,” he says. “She will be a great teacher.”

“Ann gives me a lot of confidence. She makes me feel I can do whatever I want to do,” George says. “I want to be like her when I’m a pharmacist.”

The mentor Ann Zweber, senior instructor, College of Pharmacy

The student Channa George, second-year pharmacy student from Ten Sleep, Wyoming

Making a difference Take your prescription to the Bi-Mart pharmacy on 9th Street in Corvallis, and you might find Zweber and George working side by side. Zweber works in the pharmacy part time to “maintain my practice and credibility with students,” she says. George is completing an internship as part of the pharmacy program.

George says working with Zweber gives her a role model for how to care for patients, “how she talks to them, listens to them and helps them.” The internship experience also shows how pharmacists are becoming more involved with patients and more responsible for the outcomes of medications.

“Ann gives me a lot of confidence. She makes me feel I can do whatever I want to do,” George says. “I want to be like her when I’m a pharmacist.”

“My parents gave me my first cow when I was eight,” she says. Eventually, young Dana had a herd of 35 beef cattle, which she raised on the family farm in Klamath Falls. Tuition for her undergraduate education in animal science and agricultural business management was thereby assured.

But it wasn’t until she had spent seven years as a veterinary technician that Hoyt decided to return to school to earn her DVM. Now 34, she aspires to a practice in small-animal medicine, specializing in cancer care. It was her late Rottweiler, Astro, who spurred her interest in veterinary oncology. “He got lymphoma,” she says. “The chemotherapy he received extended his life by two years before we had to put him down.”

Hoyt — whose working style is a straight-ahead efficiency punctuated with well-timed wisecracks — softens visibly when she talks about her own menagerie: a cattle dog named Joe, a “mutt dog” named Greg, and a feline duo dubbed Billy and Dharma. The objectivity she brings to her work enters into her personal pet relationships not at all. In a burst of affectionate hyperbole, she insists: “Joe is the cutest dog in the world.”

Even with gee-whiz technologies like portable ultrasound, Estill says, “the arm is still the fastest and cheapest” way to gauge pregnancy in cows.

Crane’s ease and confidence as she tends the giant bovines belies her age of 27. That’s because she was born to the profession — literally. As she explains with a slight shrug, “It’s genetic.” She was still wearing preschool-sized Oshkosh overalls when she started accompanying her veterinarian father on his rounds on Prince Edward Island off the coast of Nova Scotia. One of her earliest memories is sitting on her dad’s medical case at age five, watching him treat a uterine prolapse. “It was very dramatic looking-like a big, pink balloon,” she says. “I remember my dad swearing for the first time.”

After completing her DVM at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Atlantic Veterinary College in 2002, she came to OSU for her two-year residency. Having done her master’s thesis on the topic, “ovarian cysts in dairy cows,” Crane is clearly headed down the path her father set her on, back when her rubber boots were many sizes smaller than they are today.

These students are enrolled in Rural Veterinary Practice I, required of all 80 OSU vet-med students — an enrollment that is currently 90 percent female. Hoyt is native to Oregon. The other two women are islanders, but their islands lie on opposite sides of the world — one in the balmy Pacific, the other in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the chilly North Atlantic.

Here are their stories.

Born with a Stethoscope in Her Hand

Trading Muck Boots for a Clean, White Lab Coat

Going to College on the Black Angus Plan

Namesake for a Generation of Holsteins

There’s something serendipitous, almost poetic, about von Jouanne’s work in wave energy. She was raised in Seattle, a metropolis laced with lakes and bedeviled by drizzle. Growing up, she never went anywhere without first tossing a Speedo in her backpack, just in case a chance for a swim presented itself.

When she wasn’t swimming, Annette was tinkering. As a girl, she would borrow her engineer father’s screwdrivers to take apart the family TV and would study her college-age brothers’ engineering texts.

A competitive swimmer in college, von Jouanne married a member of the Portuguese Olympic swim team — Alex Yokochi, who is also an engineering professor at OSU. They swim daily in their dual-flume workout pool at home. They named their oldest daughter Sydney for the 2000 Olympics and their younger daughter Naiya, Hawaiian for the wild dolphins the couple has swum with in Key Largo and Kauai.

Alan Wallace

Wallace, like von Jouanne, was the child of an engineer and grew up taking apart household appliances. Although his hometown of Sheffield is landlocked, Wallace notes that “no place in England is very far from the sea.” Every year, his family summered on the coast in an old boat that had been converted to a vacation cottage. At night, lying in his room in the prow of the grounded vessel, young Alan would fall asleep to the lap, lap, lap of North Atlantic waves.

It was the North Atlantic that first piqued Wallace’s interest in ocean-generated power. As a graduate student at the University of Sheffield in the 1960s, he attended a seminar about capturing the enormous energy of the tides that surge through Bristol Channel. “It stuck with me,” he says, “all these years.”

After a 25-year career designing innovative linear motors for transit systems — in places as far-flung as Detroit, Toronto, and Turkey — Wallace was, in a sense, circling back when he teamed up with von Jouanne to puzzle out the problem of wave energy.

Bruce Mate, OSU Professor of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oceanography
Hatfield Marine Science Center

He was a Midwest kid, a self-described “technical nerd” who hung out with ham-radio buffs and fell in love with a girl who played flute to his percussion in the school band. Before he headed to Oregon with his bride, Mary Lou, to become a marine biologist, Bruce Mate had never laid eyes on an ocean. He had, however, seen a pickled sea urchin. That’s because a gifted biology teacher named Mr. Barker, hell-bent on hooking his skeptical sophomores, would order exotic marine specimens from Carolina Biological Supply. Another of Mate’s role models was ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Mate’s interest in intertidal invertebrates quickly got eclipsed, however, during his first graduate seminar when UCLA marine mammal expert George Bartholomew revealed that the migratory habits of sea lions were a mystery. Mate headed straight to the library to find out for himself. After scouring the literature, he was astonished to learn it was true. The indefatigable graduate student took this knowledge gap as a personal challenge. Armed with a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation, he made marine mammal history by figuring out the sea lions’ migration patterns.

After finishing his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Oregon, he secured funds from the newly formed U.S. Marine Mammal Commission to do the first range-wide survey of pinnipeds on the West Coast. Every month for a year, Mate would fly a single-engine Cessna with his left hand, while holding a camera out the window with his right. (The single-lens-reflex Canon F-1, with its telephoto lens, bulk film pack and motor drive, weighed 12 pounds.) Back in Newport, he processed the film and “counted the nose of every seal and sea lion” from British Columbia to Mazatlan, Mexico.

That was 30 years ago. He’s been tracking the movements of pinnipeds and cetaceans (with Mary Lou at his side) ever since joining the OSU faculty in 1973. Today, he holds the directorship and endowed chair of the Marine Mammal Program. Here are a few highlights of a career that has earned him international acclaim:

General Research Interests

Marine mammals:

• Critical habitat identification for endangered whales, population assessment, behavior (mating, feeding), seasonal migration
• Marine mammal competition with fisheries and aquaculture
• Development of high-tech research tools including satellite-monitored radio tags

Selected Scientific Committees and Professional Services

• Scientific adviser to U.S. Marine Mammal Commission (10 years, most recently 1995-2000)
• International Whaling Commission, (invited expert five years, most recently 2006) Union for the Conservation of Nature, Species Survival Commission
• Member of International Scientific Advisory Committee to Mexican Minister for the Environment on Industrial Development Proposals for Gray Whale winter reproductive habitat (1996-2000)
• Society for Marine Mammalogy, founding Secretary (1982-1988) and founding Treasurer (1982-1992)

Recent Research

Identification of migratory routes and habitats of large whales:

• Right whales in the North Atlantic(2000) and South Atlantic (2001)
• Sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico (2001-present)
• Blue whales off southern California (1998-01, 2004-5), Mexico (2001-2), and Chile (2004)
• Humpback whales off Hawaii (1995-2000), Southeast Alaska (1997), Gabon, Africa (2002), Mexico (2003) and California (2004-5)
• Fin whales in the Sea of Cortez (2001), Mediterranean Sea (2003, 2005) and California (2004)
• Gray whales off Mexico, tracked to Russian high Arctic (2005)

Awards

• Marine Mammal Investigator of the Year, Office of Naval Research, 2001
• Marine Conservationist of the Year, Long Beach Aquarium, 2000